The 30 Sci-Fi Stories Everyone Should Read

In life, there are consequences to testing ideas. Some are good, other are very, very bad. You never know where ideas will lead you. Thankfully, we have science fiction. The best writers in the genre are future architects who create safe spaces for exploring new ideas.

It's about the ethics of medical experimentation, sure, but it's also about how love works and why we bully those who are weaker than we are. Overwhelmingly, it is about the heartbreak of being a have-not when you know what it's like to be a have.

I don't care that William Gibson predicted the Internet and reality television in his pages, or that he invented cyberpunk, or even that he has time and again captured the spiritual near-dystopia of our hyperconnected, accelerating moment. These are signal achievements, to be sure. But the power of Gibson's work resides in his sentences*—lush and grievous, wearied and compassionate—and the sheer humaneness they convey.

By my lights, we vastly underrate his collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. This is probably because of the large shadow cast by his novels. But these stories are miracles of invention and devastation, each one a fresh hell made of a tried-for utopia, always richly, deeply peopled. Gibson always goes further than the conceit. Much further. In lesser hands, "Hinterlands" would be a thoroughly engrossing short story about space madness. Gibson turns it into a meditation on the agony of compassion. "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" sifts through the ruins of civilization and a single human heart. And "The Belonging Kind" is as profound a rumination on loneliness as anything in all of literature.

Because of questions like this: "How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?" And answers like this: "There was no going back … and people did their best not to think about you."

The social fabric that prevents us from being unbelievably horrible to one another is so thin that it's perpetually on the verge of coming undone. Saramago shows us just how easy it would be to pull the first thread.

"As if they had been whacked with a huge club by an invisible giant, the tigers shot up into the air for a moment, then landed on the floor of the cage with a great thud, writhing in agony, vomiting blood. The soldiers had failed to finish the tigers off with a single volley. Snapping out of their trance, the soldiers pulled back on their rifle levers, ejecting spent shells, and took aim again." And that's not even the worst part.

Everything Philip K. Dick wrote is like a bad dream and a good dream at the same time. Or a bad trip and a good trip at the same time. Or, like, what if humans and androids were totally the same and also not the same, and the fundamental question of what makes a human human doesn't even make sense, man? Did you ever think about that?

In 1973, when I was 12 years old, I stole a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions from my aunt Betsy's mantle and read it in a day and a half. It was the first book I ever really chose, first book I really read with a greed for the ideas inside it. Notably, I think, I also liked the cover—bright orange with the title bent like a locomotive, and a stamp that read A NOVEL. Best cover ever, as far as I'm concerned. I'd know that book from a thousand paces. I stole it from my aunt after seeing it from across the room.

This was before Wikipedia, of course, but even then we had a need to know. A week later I went to the Monroe Avenue branch of the Rochester, New York, public library and looked up Vonnegut. The librarian gave me two copies of The Saturday Evening Post that included stories by the man himself; a hardback copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; and the single most dog-eared book I have ever come across in all my years of reading: Welcome to the Monkey House, the 1968 collection of Vonnegut's short stories. It was in three pieces, Scotch- and masking-taped into a hopeful tablet. The pages were bent, with flipped corners, and written on, underlined, and marked up with hot little stars by three different pens. "Sorry," the librarian said of the book. "It's the only copy we have. People love that book. They steal most copies we get." She glanced at me like the thief I was (see above) and smirked. "Short stories are easier, I guess."

I'd read my share of books by then, but I'd never even heard of a short story. I read the magazines and left them there, started the novel but I thought it was gassy and serious, so I left it there too. I took that used-up edition of Welcome to the Monkey House home with me, and I never took it back.

Kurt Vonnegut's best stories (and Welcome to the Monkey House contains the bulk of them) are hyperboles of love, or science-fiction fables and manifestos, torqued-up conceits run amok within the pretty narrow strictures of his plain-Jane prose. The best ones feel like they come from a writer imagined rather than real—as if they were written by the fictional sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, I suppose, Vonnegut's nightshade image of himself. I'd never read a book like it. Never tumbled from one story to the next with the hope that it might be even better. Never lived in a circus of the absurd the way I did with that collection. I sometimes think I live there still.

Although I pressed on, and read everything Vonnegut ever wrote, I only liked four of his novels well enough to mention (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, and Galápagos). His later essays and letters sometimes seemed incomprehensible, and as an older guy who traveled in literate and literary circles, I learned to not mention him as one of my favorites. Vonnegut was openly pooh-poohed in the stripped-down fluorescent light of the minimalist 1980s and the return of the big novel that followed. I let him drift out of my head until his death in 2007.

I still believe the work in Welcome to the Monkey House is his very best. Vonnegut lived 17 years as a writer before it appeared, and it contained the first story** he ever published, and stories most of the world had never seen, since they first appeared in places like Galaxy Science Fiction. It goes end to end on the guy. In the time he took to write all that and more, Vonnegut became the man he would remain: former soldier, family man, cranky recluse, unapologetic socialist, artist with pencil, commentator, and angry voice of common sense. He died revered, remembered, and reclaimed, the most moral writer of our age, a guy who was legitimately angry at us all because we weren't willing to start everything over again, since it had gone so wrong so fast. Kurt Vonnegut left us with a fistful of masterpieces, too, of unforgettable short stories, iconoclastic in their day, iconic in ours.

Because Detective Meyer Landsman "has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, [he] tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets."

This note to future generations has been true forever: "Sometimes, in our time, families get into dark place. Family feels: we are losers, everything we do is wrong … This makes person (Father) doubt value of whole enterprise, i.e., makes Father (me) wonder if humans would not be better off living alone, individually, in woods, minding own beeswax, not loving anyone."

In a future where the wealthy outsource pain and grief to the impoverished, a hard day at the office could go like this: "The lowlight of the day is when I get to be a woman. I get to tell my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The first year of our marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst."

There are novels I like, and novels I love. And then there are those that, even while reading them, I can feel are changing my mind, tearing down and rebuilding the architecture of my interior landscape. This novel is in that last category. It's almost like a black box—an object of such remarkable construction that it should only be possible in theory.

Yet it exists: an extended meditation on the mechanics of elevation, both physical and metaphysical, about the politics and possibility of vertical mobility in America, of moving upward against the gravitational forces of racism and history.

Set in a city that is unnamed but clearly evokes a kind of alternate New York, The Intuitionist takes place in a world in which elevators are an important part of the civic discourse and elevator inspectors are powerful, public, often controversial figures, engaged in a major ideological struggle between two competing schools of thought: the Empiricists, who emphasize "the skin of things" and the Intuitionists, who, as their name suggests, rely on feeling and intuition.

No summary could convey the complexity and richness of this novel. It's a marvel, a book-length riff that works out every last bit of melody and discord, every last note of conceptual music from its brilliant initial motif. To call it an allegory or even a metaphor isn't exactly accurate. It's also not quite enough. The Intuitionist is a novel of irreducible strangeness and originality that is a permanent structure in the city of my imagination.

Okay, yeah, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But there is nothing else in science fiction like this novel's Electric Monk, "a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher … [that] believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random.

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